Machine teaches itself chess in 24 hours, attains international master level without being told the …

Machine teaches itself chess in 24 hours, attains international master level without being told the …

A student has built a computer that managed to teach itself chess, and in just three days attained a level of skill comparable with some of the world’s most skilful players. In the last two decades computers have become exponentially more powerful, but the “brute force” method of evaluating 200 million moves per second that Deep Blue employed was still the norm. Matthew Lai instead trained a “neural network” using example situations from real games of chess.Rather than searching through all possible future moves and calculating the best one, Giraffe was programmed to learn the game in a similar way to humans, at a greatly accelerated rate. Lai’s machine was built with a neural network which was fed 175 million examples of real games. It then evaluated the pieces in…